PinePhone

Just caught up on the last week's #pinephone IRC logs and @thepine64 Twitter posts. Only update that needed to be made to the first post above was the thickness growing from 8.5mm to 8.9mm. Per tllim on IRC, the dimensions are now likely finalized.

@hummlbach Those are all good, difficult and complex questions indeed. These are also questions that are beyond my competence and insight, as I know little about the manufacturing process. I'll do my best to give you a broad overview of how the Pinephone is being born and hope that you will be able to deduce answers from what I write.

Large, complex and custom built components - such as for instance a LCD + TP panel - are very expensive. Custom plastic/metal molds are expensive too, as is extensive retooling of plastic/metal molds. To maintain the Pinephone price-point, some of the components - such as parts of the case and the LCD+TP - have been sourced from reliable vendors with two major factors in mind: quality of the components (+ their long-term supply safety) and the ability of the component in question to work "seamlessly" with mainline Linux. Then there are the many custom components - including the main PCB, the inside layout of the phone, parts of case, etc., - that are assigned to design studios and manufactured by factories the studios work with.

We do not have the means or ability to vet every vendor (the number of reasons why is beyond the scope of this post, but spans from cultural to practial) nor can we influence which factories design studios work with. Now, with that said, all component vendors meet all standard manufacturing practices that apply to 99% of quality electronics on the market. We cut no corners and work with reliable partners only.

Thank you so much @PINE64 for all these information. I love already my future pinephone.
I guess Pine64 has the good strategy : a middle ability/price so called "smartphone" to start, that anyone can use for what it is, a pocketcomputer. I don''t iphoneX/galaxy15 or whatever, I have a laptop for working and people can get dsktop to make 3d animation and a nikon to take good picture.
Pocketcomputer can't do what laptop do and what desktop do!
However, too cheap and unpowerful one as mozilla bet on (Firefox OS) can't work because it has to be useful.
So, one more time, I want to thank Pine64 for their work and I think they get something here.

[edit] Oh, and I forgot to say something nice to UBport community : you know I love you too!
I have a dual boot on my nexus5 (should I say trial boot as I still have firefoxOS) since ubuntu touch 3 if I remember correctly.
I can't wait to have Ubuntu Touch running all my Pine64 devices, PinePhone, PineTab, Pinebook Pro, and PineTVbox (already possible to make, just not yet commercialized clearly, it might be missing actually) . That will be amazing!
One comment on the way : I'll delete my dual boot, lineageos and firefoxOS as soon as carddav will work between Ubuntu (Thunderbird's cardbook), Nextcloud and Ubuntu Touch (please don't answer me to give me the link to the script...

To me, if the video out will not work with Unity 8... this would be a deal-breaking disappointment I think.

The current selling point to me is this is a device we can take as a community and focus on and has an affordable price point for mass adoption.

To me, after listening to the linuxlads audiocast I felt 'The Pinephone is it'. It is affordable, freedom respecting and we can develop and test and experience the original convergence experience. To me this would be a massive disappointment if not possible. Just my opinion.

@wayneoutthere Hey Wayne. Has something or someone given you the indication that video out will not work? As things stand we have a plan A and a plan B for video out hw implementation. Obviously, we do not do software, so not sure how difficult it will be for the devs to implement it sw wise ... but seems like Marius et al have it under control.

@PINE64 Hi. It's just one more question.. about fingerprint sensors.
Even if i didn't see a fingerprint sensor in Pinephone description, have you had a thought about that ? As fingerprint sensors will become more and more indispensable nowadays ?
Thanks for your great availability.

A few questions that I'd be glad to see clarified (if that's possible today). Not to make a demand, but to know What's in it?:

weight: The wiki has 200-235 gram, whereas the initial post has between 168g and 177g. Can you confirm either value (and unit)?

sensors: Does the device have an ambient light sensor?

GNSS: Is GPS: Yes, with A-GPS, GLONASS a data point or an exhaustive enumeration of GNSS support? (Thinking about Beidou, Galileo. But also: What about SBAS support [WAAS, EGNOS]? Easiest answer would perhaps be some GNSS chip information.)

What sort of dac/amp are you using for this? Obviously a low priority, but it would be FANTASTIC to be able to throw a bunch of flac files on an microsd card and just bring this one device with me when I'm out and about, without also having to bring a dongle/amp/dap.

A few questions that I'd be glad to see clarified (if that's possible today). Not to make a demand, but to know What's in it?:

weight: The wiki has 200-235 gram, whereas the initial post has between 168g and 177g. Can you confirm either value (and unit)?

This has me curious too.

GNSS: Is GPS: Yes, with A-GPS, GLONASS a data point or an exhaustive enumeration of GNSS support? (Thinking about Beidou, Galileo. But also: What about SBAS support [WAAS, EGNOS]? Easiest answer would perhaps be some GNSS chip information.)

Sorry for the delay, I was getting some confirmations so I could offer information with a degree of precision:

@domubpkm We have considered a fingerprint sensor, but decided against it at an early stage. As stated previously, we figured the KISS principle should apply to the first phone we make.

@padu The 200-235g is probably accurate; its based on the current case + weight of everything that has to fit in it. Its not 100% precise because the PCB and various custom components don't exist yet and some things may yet change as the phone enters production. Consider it a rough estimate.

The Pinephone has an ambient light sensor - part nr. STK3335 and datasheet. While we're at it - the magneto sensor for compass part nr is: LIS3MDL and accelerator / gyro: MPU-6050.

All GPS info has been listed in the wiki, so I'll refer you to that.

@trainailleur correct, dust and water resilience / proofing is not on the agenda. Perhaps someone from the community will want to make an IP case? If so, I'm sure we'd be happy to help out. Will get back to you re. bands - perhaps best to ask TL in IRC. [edit] seems like Quectel are making some changes to the bands on the EG-25G ; but its most likely more bands will be supported rather than that they'll remove some bands

@Photojoe4 there is an amp inside the A64 - see wiki for spec details of the SOC ... should be listed. In short, nothing fancy but perfectly functional.

@PINE64 Hey sir. I understood above that it was some limitation in video out on hardware. My bad. IF it's just a software limitation than definitely Marius 'has it under control'. If he doesn't, we will gently speak to him har har

@wayneoutthere The current implementation we have in mind should make the digital video out via USB C for convergence pretty straight forward famous last words. The dev kits have a dedicated full sized video output for devs convenience so that they don't need to mess around with dongles, etc., So I hope we'll see a convergence demo on the dev kit some time before the phone comes out at the end of the year.